* * * * *
How NAZIs could be
both better and worse than you thought they were.
This is an account
of how the NAZIs affected Oberstdorf, the most Southerly village in
Germany.
The proximity of
Oberstdorf to mountain routes into Austria and Switzerland made the
village a relatively prosperous resort in peacetime and also ensured
that its inhabitants played a role in some key points in twentieth
century history, especially the annexation of Austria because
military reservists were well placed, well orientated and physically
well-suited, to simply march across the border and take possession of
key locations. The toughness and cold weather experience of the men
(mostly working in outdoor trades) from Oberstdorf and the
surrounding district also made them first choice for fighting on the
Eastern front and the village paid a heavy price because of this.
Instructively, for
the British reader, the village had minimal interactions with Britain
in both peace and war. Tourists came mostly from Northern Germany and
Holland. Even in wartime when villagers were listening to banned
radio broadcasts from outside the Reich in the hopes of finding out
what was really going on, it was to a Swiss station that they tuned.
(The author doesn’t say, but, surrounded by mountains, that may
well have been the easiest station both to receive and to
understand.) Still, for such a rural community the inhabitants were
outward-looking and knew that their prosperity depended upon
strangers. The national NAZI leadership never, in fact, managed to
turn even the opinion of some local NAZI officials completely against
the strangers in their midst, never mind that of the general
population. There was, at least at some key points in time, majority
support for the NAZIs in the village, even though some key policies
were disliked and the bullying antics of uniformed NAZI party members
widely disapproved of.
Indeed, most of the
local political confrontations were between different types of NAZI.
These don’t appear to have been rival factions so much as different
groups of people who had joined The Party for different reasons at
different times and who held different priorities. Those who had
joined because they thought something drastic simply had to be done
about Germany’s core problems, were focused on doing that and
either didn’t spare a lot of time for persecuting scapegoats, or
even quietly sabotaged the persecution whenever a safe opportunity
arose. Those who had joined out of a sense of victimhood,
particularly in the early years of The Party, were utterly committed
to the persecution of those they saw as persecuting themselves, and
were furiously opposed to those, often more senior than them, who
seemed to have other things to care about!
A larger number of
Party members joined at quite a late stage, simply because it had
become impossible to have a career or further any other form of
ambition without joining. Those who joined simply to further their
own interests could easily be incentivised to do anything Hitler
wanted them to do. They may not have been as individually monstrous
as some of the grudge-bearing, hatred-driven members with very low
party card numbers, but in the general scheme of things they were the
ones who enabled Hitler to carry out his policies. The Party was
never designed to REPRESENT its members, but to be a tool by which
The Leader controlled the membership and through them the Reich. If
Hitler has left a legacy at all, this is it. Because all over Europe
there are political parties which wouldn’t be seen dead supporting
anything that might be perceived as a NAZI policy or ideology, but
which are none-the-less well-honed instruments for implementing their
leader’s will rather than representing that of their membership or
the wider electorate. This sort of thing has become normalised in UK
politics since 1994.
As for the actual
policies: a lot of them, such as improving the position of farmers in
society and investing in agriculture would have been reasonable or
even beneficial if that was what had actually happened. But
Fuhrerprinzip or the “leadership principle” meant that it was
considered actually offensive for anyone in a leadership position to
be seen to consider the opinions of anyone who wasn’t. And so the
community of Oberstdorf, whose citizens knew an awful lot about
cattle-farming in an alpine environment, found policies being dumped
on it from above by people, most of whom knew nothing about farming.
The seeds of failure were duly sown, not just in agriculture but
across the whole of the Reich economy and German society. Even
technical education, something which Germany had once been very good
at, was massively dumbed down in favour of tighter control. Having
lauded the men literally at the grass roots of the economy, the NAZIs
proceeded to ignore them, and this, again, is something a lot of
modern political parties are guilty of.
Other policies of
Hitler were incapable of being beneficial however they were carried
out. The Jewish Holocaust is the most obvious example, but less
celebrated and in some ways even more sinister was the extermination,
completed before most of the Jews were touched, of pretty well all
the handicapped and disabled from the ethnic German population.
Hitler had stated, in a speech, that it would benefit the German
people if something like eighty thousand of the million or so babies
which were born in the Reich each year were to die. He stopped short
of openly saying that he was going to kill them all, but he did in
fact directly and personally set in motion the killing of
eighty-thousand-odd of the most handicapped or “feeble minded”
people. The thing is, this was a quota, and where there was a
shortage of very disabled people, less disabled ones could have been
selected for termination and in many cases they were. This policy
wasn’t publicly proclaimed, but local NAZI officials in Oberstdorf
knew it was coming and the NAZI Mayor Fink brought his own
handicapped son back from an institution, to the village where he was
less likely to be selected and killed. In other instances, he quietly
advised Jews and perhaps others how to register their residency in a
way that made it less likely they would be “selected” for any
sort of special measures. It is clear that Fink and some even
higher-ranking colleagues didn’t think that this sort of policy
held any benefits at all. They did not dare to openly oppose the
policies, but implemented them as sparingly as they could, whereas
the more self-interested NAZIs just did exactly what they were told
in the hope of being rewarded for doing so.
The killing of an
arbitrary percentage of the weakest in society closely parallels the
activities of Lenin and Stalin, who believed that ten percent of the
Bourgeoisie needed to be killed at regular intervals to effect social
change by creating vacancies which people of a different social class
might fill. It comes from the same class of ideas as Fuhrerprinzip,
in that it’s a top-down, single-narrative way of magically creating
a better world without having to engage in debate or with any
complicated real-world issues. It’s hard to know where this idea
originally came from, but the author’s previous book “Travellers
in the Third Reich” makes it clear that Hitler and the other top
NAZIs were greatly impressed by the writings and speeches of George
Bernard Shaw on the topic. As were Lenin and Stalin.
It is, therefore,
the Hitler policy which this reviewer most expects to see replicated
in the present day, because although very few people in influential
positions would admit to being admirers of Hitler, it’s almost
compulsory in certain political circles to profess an admiration for
George Bernard Shaw.
This is a book full
of interesting insights, but it is not a book which sets out to
reinforce the received “wisdom” about the NAZIs or anything else
and it may well prove controversial because of this. The authors have
sought out and found an awful lot of good primary source material and
their work is the sum of this, rather than any particular agenda. It
is, therefore, a more valuable book than others which might be easier
to swallow.
A Village In the
Third Reich by Julia Boyd, with Angelika Patel is published by Eliot
and Thompson on the 5th of May 2022
